Indian chipmakers move to wearables

Two Indian chipmakers are flat out developing chips which would be needed for the much hyped wearable computer boom. Sanjay Jha and Lip-Bu Tan have invested in Hyderabad-based startup Ineda Systems, which is developing a chip specifically for wearable devices, a category of computing that many see as the next big thing in technology.

Jha is the former chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility before it was sold to Google for $12.5 billion in 2011. Tan is the founder and chairman of Walden, a venture capital outfit and the CEO of Cadence Design Systems, one of the world's biggest providers of tools for chip design. The chip is planned to be launched early next year, either at CES in Las Vegas or the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Jha went on record saying that wearable devices have been stuffed up by the fact that they used smartphone processors. He thinks there will be as dramatic a migration to wearable devices once we have new chip architectures that can reduce power consumption by a factor of ten, and enable things like sunlight view ability.

Dasaradha claims that his chip reduces power consumption by one-tenth to one-fiftieth depending on use, and has a variety of features integrated into it, including sensor subsystems (to monitor, say, body vitals or movements), speech recognition and always-on capability.